 Well, good morning everyone. Thank you so much for coming out as Brittany said. It's a beautiful day, and I checked with Lou Rockwell and Pat Barnett at the Mesa Institute. It turns out we have never in our 35 years held an event in San Diego. So this is the first time even after dozens and dozens of events. Yes. Our first-ever conference in San Diego, we've had many of them in Orange County in Los Angeles, so thank you. Who says there's no libertarians in San Diego? I'm happy to report we have over 300 people today. I think about six or eight states represented and one lucky person from Australia, who may or may not make themselves known. We'll see. Finland? Okay, we have a fin. Are you escaping the Russians today? They're okay. They're okay. So it's good for me personally to be back. I lived in San Diego for many many years. My wife is from here. We met here, and our daughter was born here, and you know, when you leave San Diego, there's lots of things you miss about it and the climate and the weather and the natural beauty and all that. But I'm living proof of the fact that it is entirely possible to psychologically get over not having the San Diego Chargers in your life. So I'm confident that the Spanos family will somehow be able to soldier on without a few hundred million dollars from all of you assembled here in your city taxes. I'm really excited though to have such great speakers today. We have three speakers in particular in Patrick Byrne, Tom Woods, and Nomi Prins, who are just those kind of remarkable people who are able to excel at more than one discipline in life or more than one job in life, and that always impresses me. I think most of us would be thrilled to just start one company or write one book or have one high-powered career, but they've all done more than that. So speaking of San Diego, I wonder how many people in the room. I know Richard Ryder is here. He's an exception, but I wonder how many people in this room remember the name Dennis Thompson. I'm going to suspect not very many. So Dennis was actually a wonderful man, very sweet man, kind of a big guy, kind of a Santa Claus. Looking guy. He owned an IT company here in San Diego County way back in the 1980s, and he was a dedicated libertarian, ran for Congress a couple of times. And in 1990, he ran for Senate, I'm sorry, he ran for Governor of California in 1990 on the Libertarian Party ticket against Pete Wilson and Diane Feinstein. And this is the pre-internet age, of course, and his campaign budget was very tiny and he had to spend an inordinate amount of it on some late night cable TV ads because in 1990, late at night on certain cable stations, the ad spots were cheaper. So he had this really short clipped ad, and because it was so short, not too well produced, I might say. He felt like he had to get a lot in in the 32nd, so he comes on and he's this kind of big guy with a beard. He's like, I'm going to cut your taxes. I'm going to get government out of your life. Just this crazy diatribe. And I'm thinking to myself now, looking back, those ads probably just reached a few thousand people. On the cable TV airways. In fact, they're probably mostly insomniacs based on when they ran and they cost many thousands of dollars to air. And when we look back on that, we think, you know, not a very good return on investment. I think Dennis ultimately got about 145,000 votes in that 1990 gubernatorial election, which is about 1.89% of the electorate. So, you know, if we were to fast forward to today, 20-odd years later, I think Dennis, who unfortunately has passed away, I think he would be astonished by this world we live in where a candidate or an individual who's trying to persuade other people can reach tens of thousands or even millions of people, which is a simple click. Putting something on a website, putting something out versus social media, versus all the work he had to do in 1990 just to reach a few thousand people. But I also think he'd be shocked that in this milieu we live in that Rand Paul and Ron Paul and Gary Johnson haven't done better. It's so much easier to reach people today. We have all this technology at our fingertips. I bet he'd say, why aren't libertarians doing better? And as far as I'm concerned, especially for purposes of the day, I define libertarian broadly when I speak to audiences. And that's anyone who wants government less involved on any issue for any reason is a fellow traveler. And that's how I certainly view all of you today. I don't care much what your politics are. But this is always the question. I've attended a lot of conferences over the years. And we're very good at identifying problems and what's wrong. And of course, I'm biased. I happen to think Mises and his two conferences are a little more interesting than the ones when they talk about which guy or gal to elect or how much we should cut taxes. But we're always left with this unsettling question of what to do. Haven't we all asked ourselves that question a million times? Haven't I been asked that question a million times? What should we do? But maybe we have to look at the problem a little differently. What if the problem isn't political? And what if the solution is something that we haven't really even considered? In other words, we're framing the question to ourselves even incorrectly. And that's why today we asked all of our speakers to, if they could, give us at least one or two real action items, things that we could employ in our own personal lives that might make a difference. So I mentioned Dennis Thompson. I hope that more of you in this room remember the name Harry Brown. Can I get a show of hands? People who remember the late, great Harry Brown. Well, Harry was an investment advisor and a great libertarian. Of course, he ran for the libertarian part. He ran as the libertarian party's nominee for president in 1996 and 2000. And Harry was a tall and elegant guy, a superb speaker, always very well dressed. And his elegance, his eloquence was very much missed during this last run, this last campaign where I, with all due respect, I don't think Rand Paul and Gary Johnson had his innate ability to present the libertarian message in such a simple and a compelling way. I mean, Harry was really one of a kind. And Harry made quite a bit of money as a contrarian investor in the 1970s. He wrote a book that some of you may remember. It's called How You Can Profit from the Coming Devaluation. But he wrote a much more famous book than that entitled How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. And this was really a huge bestseller, even among non-libertarians. And it became a libertarian classic. It was a big seller in the 1970s. And I asked Tom Woods, who's here with us today, to sort of, in a tongue of cheekway, reference the book as the title of his talk. So how I found freedom in an unfree world is it predates much of the self-help genre that became so big, but in a way it's kind of a self-help book. It's full of Harry's advice about avoiding what he called traps. And what's a trap? A trap is a false way of thinking when we start to think and act in a way that we feel we should, rather than examining things for ourselves and commanding our own lives. So the book does have some sort of 70s feel to it. You know, there's a whole section on marriage and relationships where he says, well, you know, you like someone, you want to spend your life together. But gee whiz, getting married and committing forever and ever and inviting the state into your lives in the form of a contract and a marriage license. Then if you break up, you're going to have all this messiness with money and kids. Kind of a drag. So maybe you should just, you know, check up for a while, see how it goes. So, you know, it does have a 70s feel, but it asks a lot of great questions like, look, your parents think you should be a doctor, you don't want to be a doctor, forget it. You want to be an artist, go to art school, don't feel like going to college and all skip it. I think this is actually pretty radical thinking in the 1970s. I think my dad would have thought such. But really the great gift we get from this book is mindset. Harry told us we have the ability to live freely as we wish right here and right now, at least to a much greater extent than we all think. And if Harry was right, or even partially right, then the answer to the question, what should we do is first and foremost to improve our own lives. This is the key to everything. When we worry and stress too much about government and politics, we waste our energy and we fall into this libertarian glass half empty mentality. Harry called this the utopia trap. He said, some mistaken belief that we have some magical right to live in a world of our liking, which is preposterous if you think about it on its face. Other people have their own opinions, their own goals, their own values. It may be completely different from ours. So quoting here from the book, Harry says, if you're not free now, it isn't because you haven't done enough to change the world. Quite the contrary, it may be that you're doing too much to try to change the world. The effort you've expended in that direction could have been used to provide freedom for yourself. Continuing he says, you don't have to reconstruct the social order. You don't have to overpower the villains. You don't have to reeducate the world and you don't need a miracle. You can have your freedom back anytime you choose to take it. So is this hyperbole? Maybe a little bit. Nobody doubts that the state can come along and ruin your day in some pretty meaningful ways. But his point remains is that everything begins and ends with you. And mindset really has far more to do with how freely that you live than government or society does. And I know a lot of you know the name Albert J. Nock, who is really a tragically underappreciated Libertarian theorist. He grappled with this dilemma more than a century ago. And trust me, Nock was absolutely a radical who understood the threat that government poses to us. But still he was convinced that the only reform movement that mattered was the one that was from within. And that all we can hope to do is to present the world with what he termed one improved unit. And I think we all know this on some level subconsciously. But I can tell you for myself, it takes a lot of strength to apply it every day. It's not easy. It's a lot easier to wake up every day and check out the latest outrage on social media. But if Harry's right, and if Albert J. Nock is right, the most important thing you can do for your liberty far and away is to improve yourself materially, mentally, intellectually, and otherwise. That's the real revolution. And I think, you know, it was true for the high school kids who used to visit us in Ron Paul's office when I worked for him in Washington DC, they'd come in and say, oh, what should I do? What can I do? And we'd say, you know, take care of yourself, find a job, find an apartment, get situated in life, find an expertise. You know, we had a lot of brilliant kids come in who had all kinds of skills in hard sciences and mathematics and all kinds of things. And they wanted to spend their time putting out yard signs for a slightly libertarian-ish person running for Congress. So I think it was true for these high school kids, and I think it's true for everyone in this room. Nobody listens to poor, unsuccessful people. It's just a simple fact of life. And that's what Harry Brown understood, that's what Albert J. Nock understood. So focus on your own life, free yourself mentally from all this angst about government. Get on with the best possible life for you and your family. Save yourself first. Find your own freedom in an unfree world. But there's one other quick point I'd like to make before we introduce Novy Prince, and that is that, you know, we have to understand the concept that virtually everything good and meaningful that happens in the world really happens on the margins. That's where all the action is, and if we choose to see it. Now, in economics we understand this concept of the marginal revolution. It changed economics forever. It changed the way we see the world forever. It allowed us to understand that the value of everything, including your time and energy, is highly subjective. It doesn't matter what something costs in terms of the materials or the labor or the capital inputs or how much energy and time you put into it. What matters is how much people value it subjectively on the margins. And I think we can apply this to what we do in trying to persuade other people to come to our perspective. You know, I have this ridiculous drawer at home in my closet that's full of t-shirts. It's full of t-shirts that I've accumulated over the years from places like the Gap. Okay? I think there's about 40 of them in there. I have this gigantic collection. And you know what I do? I wear the same three or four off the top over and over and over again. And the rest just sit there. And so if you tried to give me a Gap t-shirt today, I wouldn't take it. I wouldn't take it for a dollar. I wouldn't take it for five dollars. You tried to give me 10 of them for free. I wouldn't take it. I would say no. But if I had zero t-shirts, I'd probably start paying five or 10 or even 20 dollars for them. So knowing that the value of our efforts as Liberty Mighty People really lies on the margins, I think it's a deceptively simple concept. You know, we all want the great leaps forward. We all want to have something like a Trump populist revolution or Occupy Wall Street or the recent Women's March or the Tea Party of a few years ago. But that's not really how the digital world works, fortunately or unfortunately. I mean, unlimited information isn't moving us towards some sort of convergence, political or otherwise, some sort of universalism. I would argue it's doing the opposite. It's moving us into enclaves. So we really need to scratch and claw and do what we can to create value at the margins. This is the world we live in, a world with an almost unbelievable amount of content and white noise. And cutting through all of it is a pretty merciless task, but it is our task and it's an incremental one. So understanding things on the margin helps us think about how to put maximum effort into things that'll produce the most productive results. And as much as it might pain any of us to say it, a simple YouTube video might do more to persuade people to think about our perspective than a 900-page magnum opus that represents someone's lifetime of work. A conversation you have with one inspired young person might have a greater impact in spurring them to action and affect the world more than all of our talks today to this room full of 320 people. So that's our task, is finding and creating value on the margins. So I have a couple minutes to leave you with one action item because I said that I would provide at least one action item for the crowd today. And the action item is this, is become a cash rebel. Cash is the most rapidly disappearing commodity I would venture on earth. And in places like Japan and the Scandinavian countries, it's become virtually unused. And that's a very, very frightening thing, both from a metadata perspective, from a privacy perspective, from a tax perspective. I think the war on cash is not hyperbole. I think it's quite real. And you don't even have to be a conspiracy theorist to believe that it wouldn't take much for another crisis like the one we suffered through in 0708 to occur, which would put a lot of banks and a lot of mutual funds and a lot of ATM machines onto some kind of suspended status. I would encourage everybody in this room, if you can only manage $500, $1,000 somewhere at home, do it. If you can have 10 or 20 or 30 or $40,000 at home, do it. I absolutely believe this. And it's just one example. I mean, obviously, we're in an earthquake zone here. But when we lived in just outside of Washington, DC, we had this bizarre summer storm that knocked out power for a couple of days. Of course, it was 90 degrees and humid. And a lot of the local groceries and gas stations were cash only. Their digital payment systems were down during those couple days. And it was interesting to see how people responded to each other after just a couple days of hardship and heat and no air conditioning. So it doesn't take much, ladies and gentlemen. And a little bit of cash in your pockets might be a good thing. So thank you very much for your time.